Twitter may stop counting links and photos as part of your 140 character limit.

Twitter may stop counting links and photos as part of your 140 character limit.

It’s been reported that Twitter will soon stop including links and photos in the 140-character allowance, giving you more room to visually and contextually express your message without having to compromise on supporting text.

Currently links and photos take up 23 and 24 characters, respectively, of your 140-character allowance, no matter whether you shorten a link or have up to 4 photos.

It wasn’t long ago that reports suggested the character limit would be extended to a whopping 10,000. However, that never came to fruition and will leave many of us sceptical of the latest suggestions that Twitter is considering dropping the link and photo character allowance.

The change will be welcomed by many as the promise of more space to get their message across will indefinitely make life a bit easier.

I, for one, battle with the restrictive conditions on a daily basis and use a combination of a spreadsheet and a thesaurus to refine my Tweets. On the other hand, the challenge of fitting everything into such a small sentence of few words does have its benefits; it forces us all to carefully craft copy and create more concise messages that, although taking more time, our audiences will find easier to digest and understand.

It will, however, make everyone’s lives a lot easier if we have all the 140 characters to fill with text without having to forgo an image or an extra descriptive adjective that will lure our audience in.

The announcement comes just days after Instagram changed its logo, resulting in an uproar from Instagrammers across the World. Instagram’s new look hasn’t been welcomed with open arms but it does remind us that social media platforms evolve. Fast.

Technology is eternally evolving and improving to make our lives easier. The same goes for social media. With new social media platforms emerging each year, and many of those failing to catch on, the big players- Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc.- must keep up with the speed at which technology moves, and with which people’s requirements and expectations move in correlation, to ensure their survival.

Twitter is struggling to attract new users and has experienced a 70% price decline in its shares over the past year. To stay in the game, Twitter has to make changes. In my opinion, the relaxation of the character requirements of links and photos is just a small change compared to what we should expect to see over the coming months.